Meet Your Creator: Robb Armstrong (JumpStart)

This latest "Meet Your Creator" post is a new and fresh take on our concept. JumpStart creator/cartoonist Robb Armstrong was recently interviewed by a student for a class project by aspiring cartoonist Jake. Based on the interview, Jake may have future options in journalism or blogging as well! Here is the Q & A between Robb and Jake. Enjoy...

JAKE:
What inspired you to become a cartoonist?

ROBB: I have always loved to draw,
even when I was too young to be any good at it. I used to really like the
comic strip PEANUTS when I was little. I copied that artwork from a very
young age, about 3 years old, until I could draw a recognizable “Charlie Brown" when I was about 5 or 6. I also loved
cartoons on TV, especially “The Flintstones”. By the age of 10, I could draw a
pretty good “Fred Flintstone”. I also liked a strip called, Wee Pals when I
was a kid. Imagine my excitement when I signed my professional contract at the
still young age of 27, and met my heroes, Charles Schulz (PEANUTS) and Morrie
Turner (Wee Pals).

The thing about drawing cartoons
that I loved the most was the reaction I was able to get from my family and
friends. I discovered that the ability to draw is similar to performing magic.
People stand in amazement watching it happen. Kids who wouldn’t ordinarily be
nice to me were super nice once they saw me draw my cartoons.

JAKE: What was your first “big break”?

ROBB: In seventh
grade, I began to struggle academically. This was partly because I had
transferred to a private school. The Shipley School for Boys and Girls was very
different from the public school I used to go to. For one thing, Shipley was
formerly a school for girls. It was also my first time meeting students who
were not African-American. I was in a new environment that challenged me in
every way! Plus, the work itself was difficult for me, and my grades slipped.
Badly. My math and science grades were so poor that Shipley decided to keep me
in seventh grade an extra year. THIS TURNED OUT TO BE MY BIG BREAK! I learned
to push myself harder than I was used to. I learned self-discipline. I learned
to prioritize, and not spend too much time playing instead of working. These
habits have come in handy as a professional cartoonist. My current deadlines
are daily and I need to push myself mentally, and creatively. I need the self-discipline
I learned when I was young to keep me on track today. Mostly, I simply learned to work very hard, no matter how I
feel about the work itself.

I began to have a number of
“big breaks” in high school and at Syracuse University. My high school began
publishing my work, and at the age of 17, I sold political cartoons to a real
big-city newspaper, The Philadelphia
Tribune! I created a comic strip in
college called “Hector” that ran in The
Daily Orange newspaper for all four years of college. It was a hit with
students and faculty.

Another
“big break” came in 1987. Two years after graduating from Syracuse University, I
met Morrie Turner, the creator of “Wee Pals”. He liked my work and introduced
me to some of his colleagues in the comic strip industry. One friend was Mark
Cohen, a collector of original comic art. He enjoyed my work as well. I
didn’t know it, but he was a friend of Charles Schulz and passed my work along
to him! This led to my meeting Schulz’s editor at United Feature Syndicate,
where I was offered a contract in 1988. This was when I created JumpStart.
Two years later, I met Schulz, himself, and began a friendship that lasted
until his death in 2000.

JAKE: How much of your comic relates to happenings in
reality? Do Joe and Marcy relate to anyone you know in real life?

ROBB: One night at dinner, my
daughter(who was only about 6 at the time) said, “I can’t eat that chicken”.

I said, “Why not?”

She said, “because I’m a
vegetarian.”

My wife said, “Since when?”

My daughter said, “Since
tonight.”

I said,”well, that’s fine,
but you do know that you have to start eating vegetables. All vegetarians eat
vegetables.”

She said, I do eat
vegetables! I love them!”

My wife said, “LIKE WHAT?”

My daughter said, “Like macaroni
and cheese. THAT’S a vegetable!”

This is a true story that ended
up being used directly in my comic strip! If something is true and funny, and
works with the characters in my strip, I will use it. My characters are based
on my family, but there are big differences. In JumpStart, Joe and Marcy have four kids, but in real
life, my wife Crystal and I only have two (no real-life twins). Also, the
characters have different careers than we do. Joe is a cop and Marcy is a
nurse. In real life, I’m a cartoonist and my wife is an event planner. The
inspiration comes from how the characters feel about each other, and how they
respond to ordinary problems. I am always looking at life for situations that
work well with the characters and feels natural and believable. Readers laugh
when a strip is TRUE, moreso than when it is “funny”.

JAKE: Are you the only person working on JumpStart? Do you
have colleagues working with you? Do you make up all of the ideas for each strip, or do you
ever take some from fans like me? (If so, I’ll get right to work!)

ROBB: Haha! Sorry Jake. I work alone on JumpStart. (Every day
for 23 years.) I do have an Editor at Universal UClick, my syndicate in
Kansas City, MO. His job is to make sure I meet my deadlines, and the strip
contains no grammatical mistakes, or problematic language. The syndicate has
artists who add color to the strip on GoComics.com during the week. I color the Sunday strips
myself.

I do not solicit ideas or buy gags from outside writers.
Some cartoonists do. It’s not that other writers aren’t good enough; it’s just
that JumpStart is my personal contribution to the world I live in. I enjoy
coming up with my own ideas. Exercising my mind has kept me youthful. I am 51
years old, and appear to be 10 or 15 years younger. I attribute this to a zest
for life and regular mental and physical exercise.

JAKE: What
is the process to take your idea and turn it into the comic that appears in my
driveway every Sunday morning? (You can skip the slow delivery boy; I’ve
already had words with him.) I’d like to know about how you capture your ideas,
the steps to make a rough drawing, how to convert it into an ink version, when
and how you color it, and what it looks like when you submit it to newspapers.

I begin with a very rough drawing. This is mostly to figure
out the composition, and to see if the strip has good timing. A comic strip
should be sort of fast-moving in terms of the amount of words. At this stage, I
am not concerned with the “beauty” of the artwork. There will be time for that
during the inking. This stage is really about the writing and the concept
itself. I’d read in a magazine on a flight from LA to Philadelphia that men shave 20,000 times in a lifetime. Ideas are all around us all the time. The
skill is in recognizing a good possible strip when you see it. A lot of my
ideas come during conversations with people. When someone is emotional about a
topic, it means many people will relate to that topic. Extreme anger, happiness
or sadness or love or commitment means many humans share that emotional
connection to the topic. This is called “Universal appeal”. Comic strips are
seen by people of all ages and races and needs this “Universal” quality.

I sketch out a frame that is 13 inches wide and 3 inches
tall. I use ordinary Xerox paper or a cheap pad of paper from a dollar store.
Six DAILY strips are due and one SUNDAY strip every Thursday.

Once I’m happy with the rough sketch, I tape it down to a
lightbox. (This is a box with a glass on top and a light bulb in the middle.)
Then I tape finger-painting paper over the rough. (I use children’s
finger-painting paper because of its durability and how it holds a rich,
non-blurry black line. I draw with a Papermate Flair Pen you can find at CVS or
Office Depot) I then trace the rough, trying to retain as much of the loose
energy as possible. I love the look of my roughs, and want the finish to look
lively as well. Next, I handle the lettering. Sometimes, I improve the wording
at this point. You can see an example of this in the rough sample here:

Each
letter must be drawn big, clear and easy to read! Each word must have room
around it, and once inside the balloon, the words must float in the center of
that space evenly. Kids really struggle in this area. I once taught cartooning
to children. I have rarely met a child who is good at lettering, and it is by
far the most important aspect of the final comic strip! Practice lettering
every day. I used to draw the alphabet from A to Z repeatedly until I had
handsome lettering that came naturally.

I do lettering first, then balloons, then frames, then
characters, then backgrounds. (Don’t put too much stuff in backgrounds!) Each
daily strip takes two hours from start to finish. Sunday strips take three
hours each.

I never rush or draw lazily.

Once the inking is complete, I untape the finish and the
rough from the lightbox. I store the rough in my files. I make a clean copy of
the original work (at 80 per cent to fit on my scanner) and store the original.
I do sell these, but they are expensive. (A single JumpStart original costs
$300.00 for a daily strip, and $500.00 for a Sunday strip.)

I scan the reduced copy into Photoshop. I then clean up any
errors or stray marks. I create two versions of each comic strip. One is clean
line art, to be used on GoComics.com (a colorist at my syndicate will color
this version per my direction) and the other version has gray tones, which is
what is printed in most newspapers. This is all done in Photoshop, a step which
takes another three additional hours for a week of strips. I color the Sunday
myself using a numbered guide (990 is red, 003 is blue, etc.) Once the strip is
ready, I send it digitally to my syndicate in Kansas City. Before computers,
this was done via FedEx and was an expensive headache. Now it is done inside a
software program called FTP. It’s a breeze! Sure beats chasing a FedEx truck
down the street!

I am not involved past this stage. Getting to your driveway
is the job of my syndicate and the newspaper companies, themselves. Having worked on my college
newspaper, I know that their steps are labor-intensive and arduous! Even the paperboy is sweating to get there!

Good luck with this project, Jake, and in your future career
in this exciting field!

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